[CHARTS] The Thousands Of High-Skilled Workers Who Can't Work For US Companies Because The Visa System Is Broken

A cornerstone of both the
President's and
Senate plans for immigration reform involve increasing the
number of visas available for highly skilled workers that have
been recruited by American companies.

The key bottleneck comes in
when foreign citizens with a F1 visa — permission to study at an
American university — graduate and try to transition to an H-1B
visa, which allows those American-educated workers to work in the
United States. If someone with an F1 visa can't get an H-1B, they
may take their U.S. education back home with them.

To even
apply for the H-1B visa, a person with an F1 student visa
needs a job offer in hand, a degree or 12 years
work experience, $325, an employer willing to sponsor an H-1B
visa and pay between $750 and $1,500 as a basic fee and up to
$3,725 in additional fees and no less than seven individual
documents.

Because there are mandatory caps on the number of H-1B visas —
functionally 85,000, with few exceptions — many of these
highly trained workers are denied permission to work in the
United States, despite their abilities to generate value for the
economy at nearly no impact to the average American worker.

As a result of caps on H-1B
visas, 41,753 full petitions for temporary worker status were
denied, withdrawn, or closed over the past four fiscal
years.

Here's a chart of this
data:

Walter Hickey/BI, data from
CIA

One major issue for these
applicants — and a reason why the CIS stats may underestimate the
number of students who want H-1B visas but are unable to get them
— are the number of days it takes for the U.S. to hit the
cap for H-1B visas.

The decrease since 2011 is
worrisome for firms that rely on U.S. educated foreign-born
professionals.

A year's worth of visas were
all issued within two and a half months for fiscal year 2013.
Companies that need a consistent inflow of these workers are
aiming for a brief visa window that is getting much
smaller.

This also means that the denial
rates from the CIS may be an underestimation of the people the
U.S. turns away.

Once the CIS announced that
they had run out of visas on June 11, they stopped accepting —
and thus denying — visa petitions, meaning that nine and a half
months worth of visas are potentially unaccounted
for.